CITY AND SUBURBAN
A nice surprise for David Hunt the City has taken to thinking ahead
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ihope that David Hunt is interested in the future of our leading export industry. He may not even realise that it is part of his new job, along with looking after the Duchy of Lancaster, standing up for sci- ence, and acting in some undefined way as the Prime Minister's chief of staff. He will find it in his pending tray, a legacy fron William Waldegrave, who has gone off to muddy his boots with the cash crops of sub- sidy and set-aside. Earlier this year Mr Waldegrave set off what he called the Technology Foresight Programme. The idea was to work out how 15 different sec- tors of industry could become more com- petitive by thinking further ahead. He rounded up the usual suspects — commu- nications, electronics, life sciences — but brought in something new: financial ser- vices. They do in their peculiar way earn enough money abroad to pay for Britain's deficit on manufactured goods, but other ministers prefer to leave them to get on with it, and when the Department of Trade and Industry was asked to back a study of competitiveness, Lord Young dismissed it out of hand. Now, though, a research team under Michael Hughes, global strategist at Barclays de Zoete Wedd, is beavering away. Soon it will blanket the City with its questionnaires and soon after that it will report. This is not at all the sort of Royal Commission that, as Harold Wilson said, takes minutes and lasts years. The technol- ogy, Mr Hughes says, already exists. What will count is how his industry intends to use it. Regulation will affect that. So will the artificial costs and limits of communication. So will education and training. The state spends fortunes on them, but not much, now, in ways that help this industry. Gradu- ates turn up knowing nothing of financial economics: 'They do whatever they want to do at university', says Mr Hughes, 'and then we have to train them again.'
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